5 helpful tips from successful CEOs to help your productivity in 2020

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Do you sometimes feel like you are wasting much of your time? If so, then you might want to stop for a minute and evaluate your daily activities. If, in doing so, you find that you’re spending much of your time on the less valuable things, you might want to consider making some positive changes in this new year. In this new year, make the decision to live more productively so your life can take on a new meaning to it. We all aim to be successful in all of our daily endeavors, after all, no one wants to be a failure. One way to do this is by channeling our inner motivation.

A lot of highly successful individuals, past and present, have spent much time and resources trying to find the ultimate secret to this, usually to no significant success, ironically. However, many of these successful folks swear by a few changes that turned their lives around. Here are five CEOs that can help to teach us how to become more productive in 2020.

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Persevere

“I do not think that there is any other quality so essential to success of any kind as the quality of perseverance. It overcomes almost everything, even nature”. – John D. Rockefeller, Founder and CEO of Standard Oil.

If your perseverance level is low then your chances of success are even slimmer than what is an already daunting prospect. Perseverance allows you to forge ahead, even when faced by the most difficult of situations. This single characteristic essentially separates those who succeed from those who give up at the slightest appearance of difficulty. As we all know, life is no bed of roses, that said, most highly successful people truly believe that their ability to persevere in the face of challenges is what they owe their success to.

Surround yourself with other successful people

“It’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you’ll drift in their direction”. – Warren Buffett, investor, business magnate, CEO and chairman of Berkshire Hathaway.

A surefire approach to progressing in life is to surround yourself with people who are better than you. For one, you don’t want to get left behind so you’re forced to strive harder to get to their level. Even the bible says to show me your friends and I’ll tell you who you are. People we interact will help form most of our thoughts and beliefs, just like people we associate with can play an important role in our behavior. Many important figures throughout history will give this advice so you can increase your productivity. Therefore, evaluate your surroundings; constantly check to see if the people you surround yourself with make you want to be better. If that isn’t the case, you should consider making some necessary changes this year.

Take risks

“The biggest risk is not taking any risk… In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks”. – Mark Zuckerberg, owner and CEO of Facebook.

Start taking bold steps in this new year. If you’re comfortable with your current position, then you’re not progressing. Don’t judge yourself by your past successes, rather challenge yourself with what is possible in the future. Some of the most successful people in history are risk takers. Be adventurous and challenge yourself with the unknown.

It’s easy to believe that you’ll get burned if you take risks. While this saying can be true often enough, a lot of new ventures don’t stand the test of time anyway, so you might as well fail spectacularly while doing something no one has done before instead of ending up failing while doing what everyone else does.

Learn from failure

“Failing at something isn’t what defines you, what you learn and how you bounce back from failure is what does.” – Michael Dadashi, CEO of Infinite Recovery.

No one is born perfect and as a result, we are all bound to experience failure at one point or the other in life. It is easy to accept failure as ultimate and thus give up, but what separates great people like Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein from a host of unknown predecessors and successors in their field is the ability to adapt, persevere and move forward. Failure can become a good teacher if you don’t get paralyzed by it. Once you realize that you can never have true success without first experiencing failure, you learn to embrace failure and use it as a stepping stone to success.

Set goals to be successful

“All who have accomplished great things have had a great aim; have fixed their gaze on a goal which was high, one which sometimes seemed impossible”. – Orison Swett Marden, inspirational author and founder of Success Magazine.

Goal setting is another key point many successful CEOs swear by. Setting practical goals and following through on them helps pave the way for you to achieve your dreams. A frequent but unfortunate byproduct of setting yearly goals is that most people give up on them early. When setting future goals, try to develop a roadmap for you to achieve them. Break your bigger goals into smaller and more practical steps and celebrate the achievement of each one you succeed with. Positive and negative reinforcements can be very useful when working towards your goals. Reward yourself when you achieve a goal and reprimand yourself when you fail, but don’t dwell too long in either.

Follow the tips given above by these CEOs in this article and thus build a solid foundation for your life, one that can propel you to higher heights and greater depths of success. Let 2020 be your year of positive change.

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